On Sat, Dec 18, 2021 at 8:07 PM geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>
You and who's army? If one of the world's more
questionable
governments decides to target Wikipedians within its territory there's
not a thing you can do about about it. You’re not France. You can’t
threaten governments into submission (and if one of the most powerful
states on earth can’t get Zara Radcliffe out you certainly can’t).
You’re not a mineral extraction company. You don’t have mercenaries on
retainer to try and get your people out.
You policy is worse than useless. It doesn’t help at all but
marginally increases the risk of being involved with Wikipedia as what
can be seen as a harmless hobby writing about trains turns into being
involved with a human rights campaigning organisation.
There seems to be a lot of distress in this email, and I'm sorry to see it.
:( I hope I can speak thoughtfully to these issues without raising dangers
or making it seem like your concerns - which are completely valid and which
I share - are being minimized.
For those who don't know me, I'm the VP of Community Resilience and
Sustainability
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resilience_and_Sustainability>.
For full disclosure, I'm not one of the team working on the Human Rights
Policy directly, but one of the people who is working on that directly does
report up through my line to me. I hired him. He is our Human Rights Lead
in charge of working to intervene in exactly such situations. We hired him
because we have faced exactly such situations, and we needed competent
approaches for threats that would arise whether we wanted them to or not.
I'm only going to speak here to that element of this policy, since it is
one of the specific areas of my focus.
I've spoken about our human rights interventions at the higher level in my
office hours several times over the past year. (They are linked, with
notes, from the page above.) The role rose when an early approach one of my
teams led to collaborate across particularly high risk regions on finding
resources for people in trouble
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Voices_under_Threat> led us to find more
critical need for direct support. We CANNOT threaten governments. We are
NOT an extraction company. You are totally correct. We need to stay humble
in our approaches. Instead, the Human Rights Team
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Human_Rights_Team> who supports threats on
the ground is working on several initiatives to help that includes digital
security training and importantly partnerships with organizations around
the world who DO have these abilities.
Raising the danger of Wikimedians is something I take very, very seriously.
Where I work, I can't help but be incredibly aware that no matter how it is
seen, being involved with Wikipedia is not - for many - a harmless hobby
writing about trains. Some of the people we've tried to support have joined
it expecting precisely that, only to find that malign actors around them
already perceived it differently and attempted to pressure or harm them to
get what they wanted.
Our Global Advocacy and Policy teams have the hard job of trying to support
an environment wherein knowledge remains free. I admire them for it and
recognize the hard haul of what they're doing, in a shifting legislative
landscape where this can't be taken for granted anywhere.
My focus is on the people who contribute. I think they must be *informed* -
must know the risks when and where they engage - and must be supported in
doing so *as safely as possible*. I think when things go wrong they need to
have somebody who can help them. Our Human Rights Team is making
connections so that when the things that go wrong come from organized
persecution (<--best words I can think of to describe terrorism, government
groups, etc. This is distinct from individuals being jerks to each other.)
We are short-staffed at the end of the calendar year and with the rising
tide of illnesses globally again, but I do want to note that while I have
contributed some information to the FAQ that will be issued by the Global
Advocacy Team in due course, I know there's a lot of interest in precisely
HOW we work with people who are persecuted.
Y'all, I'm very sorry, but I can't lay out our playbook. Geni is completely
right that this can raise the threat level for people. I always think about
the English Wikipedia's essay on BEANs
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_stuff_beans_up_your_nose>.
I don't want to give people ideas or make it easier for them to exploit
gaps in our ability to handle problems. For this reason, I've always
struggled with whether it's better to* not *raise the specter of human
rights violations to those who might not have considered that there are
rights to violate here or to *not* inform the community at large that some
people are violating those rights already. There are pros and cons for both
approaches, and while I know we won't get the balance perfect I will myself
keep trying to figure out how to do it right.
It's also true that it's not yet an "If this/then that" situation. My
team
also handles the emergency@ workflow, which is very straightforward -
assess incoming concerns against a protocol developed by a professional
external agency and pass it along to international responders as
appropriate through well-defined contacts. Easy to lay out what we do, how
we do it, why we do it the way we do it. There's nothing straightforward
about this work. We are building out global systems, but work closely with
individuals to understand the nature of the threat and to help them tap
into safe existing systems for their support.
I'm pretty happy about this policy myself. We've been building out these
capacities for a few years now, but there's a lot of ground still to cover.
The policy helps (imo) support that our commitment to this remains top of
mind. And I think it is the right time, with the systems we HAVE created,
to discuss the manifestations of such abuse a little more publicly, in
order to protect our people and to better understand as Wikimedians how our
own systems may put people in danger.
Sorry for the lot of words. I really want this to remain a safe place for
people to write about trains but also about other things. I also will have
limited time to respond to follow-ups over the next few weeks for the
reasons I mentioned above, but I am due for another office hour where I may
be able to talk with those of you who want to about the aspects of our
interventions that can be discussed without raising danger.
Warm regards,
Maggie
--
Maggie Dennis
She/her/hers
Vice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.